


i disdain all glittering gold

by writer168



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blacksmith!Konan, F/F, Short One Shot, mermaid!sakura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29054682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writer168/pseuds/writer168
Summary: Have you heard about the mermaid at the docks?
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Konan
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	i disdain all glittering gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thirrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thirrin/gifts).



_“Have you heard about the mermaid at the docks?”_

Konan doesn’t listen much to rumors. She works and sleeps and works again, the fires of her forge a heavy heat against her back as she hammers away at noblemen’s pretty swords and molds heavy shields for the soldiers who die on battlefields. It’s hard work but it’s honest, and she’ll always stay humbled by the burns stretched across her forearms like love bites and by the black soot that brushes her temple in the sweetest of kisses.

Her apprentice, Tenten, always minds the grime.

There will come a day when she won’t.

_“They say she grants wishes.”_

Rumors aren’t like the cold hiss of finished iron nor the bright sparks of sharpening. There’s no truth in the weight like a grip between callused fingers, and it always passes like seven waves on seven seas until it’s far past her shoulders and by next week it’s already half forgotten. 

But, Konan would admit that this particular rumor wasn’t quite like the rest. It had come a month ago on an old fishing ship with its young swishing sailors—a man who’d left his farming days behind spoke of a mermaid he’d spotted, _a fishwoman with a tail from my feet to hat, red as rubies sparklin’ in that high sun_ ; then came the deck boy with palms pink and raw from scrubbing salt washed floors swore on _bright green eyes in dark, dark pools, too bright to be in that ocean but too_ somethin’ other _for all else_ ; last the captain with his stitched face and eyes only for gold coin, spoke low, spoke that _long pink hair twined my skin and my heart while that merfolk whispered in my ear that she’d give me everything, everything, and all I need was ask._

_“But there’s a price.”_

That captain became known as Kakuzu; The Grudge of the Brine; the most notorious pirate East.

_“There’s always a price.”_

Seven years later he turned up dead, crude cut emeralds in his sockets and a single red scale upon his tongue.

_“They say you can find her on the southern port under the docks where the rowdy Inuzuka boys chip the posts to keep track of the dogs they spot on the shores.”_

Go at midnight, go alone, and Konan always rolled her eyes and re-tied her blue hair in a bun before hammer-hammering the metals that’ll be christened with blood. She thinks back to the metal embedded in her bottom lip from a life long gone and the two boys she loved, now two boys she lost. They wanted to rule the world and she couldn’t find her sea legs, so she hugged them and bid them and told them to go to the ends of the land and to come right back where she’d be smithing and selling and waiting all the while.

She waited.

She waited.

And she waited some more.

It was seven years later that she’d heard the tale of two corpses of kings washed on sand, one with hair red as roses and the other orange as tumeric. They’d been dressed in riches unimaginable with emeralds posing as eyes and those same red scales in their mouth looking as if they’d been dyed well with cochineal.

In one of their pale hands grasped a note unfinished.

_To our dear friend who’d been smithing and selling and waiting,_ it ended.

She stopped waiting.

_“The world’s a mess, a burden, a disease.”_

Konan doesn’t remember how long she’d built this forge under her name and the grace of all those with gold on their goblets, but she knows she never needed wishes to be great. She can warp the soil’s backbone under brown gloves and hellfire; what use is there to sell her soul to the demons down below?

So she works and she melts and she casts and she whets in a haze of pretty swords and heavy shields, but when the sun falls and the forge doors shut she keeps hammer-hammering one sword in particular. It takes her moonrise after moonrise to craft that blade—sharp enough to skin scales, tough enough to crush emeralds.

It takes seven years until it’s perfect.

Konan refuses to see her omen.

_“But it doesn’t have to be.”_

One midnight when the town sleeps in their beds, the forge fires don’t flame on burning coal but burning amber eyes, and that same town knows no different. In the darkness she slinks, cloak wound tight over pale shoulders and a sword glinting so sharp it could cut words at their root. She goes to the docks in the southern port and seeks out the chipped post whose nicks could be spotted in the far distance. 

The wood creaks under light feet, and ten steps from shore Konan balances at the edge with sea spray against her cheeks and the crash of rolling waves rumbling distantly in her ears.

“I know you’re out here,” she speaks into the dark and draws her sword. “Killer. Murderer. _Witch_.”

_“When you search for her, be wary.”_

Konan shouldn’t have listened much to rumors. They told her to look for red tails, green eyes, pink hair, and it all came together to this monster man should never dare come close to seeing—a nightmare beyond comprehension. But as the water before her ripples and parts, a form rises.

“Witch?” A voice of a thousand of the sweetest melodies asks. “How can I be a witch if all I’ve done is give them what they want?”

A beast doesn’t surface.

An otherworldly majesty does.

Soaked strands frame the most delicate heart-shaped face for the pinkest lips so supple and eyes that draw her down so far Konan never notices when she ends up on her knees just to bow closer. Sun-warmed skin runs down a slim neck, down a perfectly curved chest, down to where red scales blended.

_Emeralds. Cochineal_.

Konan’s grip tightens around her sword and she pushes it forward between her and the poison of an ethereal beauty.

“Nagato and Yahiko deserved to live.”

_“You’ll believe yourself strong. You’ll believe yourself willed.”_

“And they did,” the mer-which says. “They were Kings of the World.”

“They never came home.”

“They never asked.”

_“You won’t be.”_

“I’ll kill you,” Konan hisses. “For every dream you’ve soiled and every soul you’ve devoured I’ll kill you over and over again until you’re begging for mercy at the tip of my steel. Your bones I’ll grind and your tail I’ll mount above my fires where I’ll tell of the mermaid who was really the devil in disguise.”

Hands nimble and soft and with the sheen of cold waters reach up past the deck. One thumb wipes soot off a forehead and tucks angry strands of blue hair behind wind-chilled ears. It’s then that Konan sees the little flowers decorating the tops of the mermaid’s shoulders, little pink blossoms bunched on branches. Sakura. All Sakura.

“There’s no devil in me,” this Sakura whispers against the chapped lips of the head she’s tugged closer. “There are only the things I’m made of, just wishes and trinkets. Tell me your loves, your shames, your desires, and I’ll give them all. You’ll live happy and true, filled and prospering.”

_“Take a step towards her and you’re done for.”_

Konan knows she should be thinking of her boys and the revenge she sought for their memory.

All she can think of is how she wants red scales smoothed beneath her fingertips.

_“Because she’ll ensnare you, and she’ll ask,”_

“What is it that you’d wish for?”

Konan’s eyes drop back down to those pinkest, plumpest lips, and longs to taste the faint rush of the ocean.

_“Then it’ll be like you’ve planned it all along when you reply,”_

“What is it that you’d give me?”


End file.
